Movie Review: Sex and the City 2

Managing feisty and frivolous in equal measure, the SATC women return to the big screen in a surprisingly big way in Sex and the City 2. Intent on bragging when not teasing the more skeptical in the audience that fun doesn’t end after men and marriage or the beginning of middle age and menopause, the Big Apple friends ditch their insular Upper East Side for the Middle East, and the temptations of daringly uninhibited—even if unintentional—SATC style culture clash.

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When the still single and proud Samantha (Kim Cattrall) receives an all-expense-paid offer to travel to Dubai, Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), Charlotte (Kristin Davis), and Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), along with their co-starring closets full of clothes and designer furniture, take a break from their families and go for it. It seems one of Sam’s many former lovers—a Hollywood hunk filming in the Sahara—befriended an enormously wealthy sheik, and he’s extended the invite to his sumptuous palace getaway via private jet. Or something like that.

Not that the women are going to succumb to serious homesickness anytime soon: Lawyer Miranda just quit her job after locking horns with an overbearing boss and is looking forward to down time while reordering her priorities, Charlotte grabs the opportunity to flee a wailing baby, and novelty junkie Carrie, who just recently got caught with her fly open while in tuxedo drag as the best man at a lavish gay wedding, definitely needs time out to brood about the “sparkle” decline in her marriage—her increasingly stay-at-home spouse Mr. Big (Chris Noth), who’s getting more attached to their couch than to her.

Just when it seemed like that SATC perpetually restless posse might get awfully tedious and redundant, writer/director Michael Patrick King—of all things, a man—works in some magic to widen and deepen their horizons in wonderful new ways. And though their frequently small and silly shared world initially comes off as a tad inappropriate in that war torn part of the world, King eventually serves up sobering flourishes—even if they are on the light side—including sheik sexism, burka blues and an acute class awareness that behind every overly lavish lifestyle are solemn servant sacrifices.

SATC2 is an excellent, sexy adventure for the flaky fashionista lovesick-when-not-lusty girlfriends, in which this giggly and outrageously glamorous forever foursome rocks. And when they don’t, there’s always shopping as the cure.

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